The present disclosure relates to the control of access to software applications.
Software applications usage is common among large segments of the population. This is especially true over the Internet, wherein effectively everyone may access software applications that are hosted on server computers, such as by connecting remotely to them with their client computers.
However, some software applications may be inappropriate for a particular age group. For example, parents may wish to prevent children within certain age groups from using social networking services where it is possible to interact unsupervised with adults. Likewise, parents may wish to prevent children's access to age inappropriate content (such as photos, movies).
In the art there are software applications that have terms and conditions that grant access only to persons having specific ages. For this purpose, the age of the person is generally verified by a simple self-certification, which is performed when the person signs in to the software applications (e.g., by providing their date of birth). However, no guarantee exists that the age declared by the persons is true.
Several techniques are also known for verifying the actual age of the persons signing in to an application. For example, United States Patent Publication No. 2010/0251336 discloses a combination of audio tones with varying frequencies to identify an age range to which a user belongs and accordingly controls access to age dependent access controlled information and services.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,185,646 discloses the use of biometric templates (stored during the user enrollment process) to authenticate users logging into the social network to prevent user impersonation.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,853,535 discloses the technique of assigning each child a Safe Card with integral fingerprint scanner plus an intelligent USB card reader, which are used to access the Internet from any web-enabled computer simply by plugging the card reader into the computer's USB port, inserting the Safe Card, and scanning the fingerprint so as to pre-load parental control rule sets giving the child-user a restricted safe and secure, but full internet, experience.
United States Patent Publication No. 2008/0033941 discloses receiving biographical information pertaining to an unverified individual, authenticating that the biographical information is correct for the individual, assigning the individual a verified chat room username that is linked to the authenticated biographical information, and using the authenticated biographical information to selectively limit chat room activity for the username.
United States Patent Publication No. 2011/0209192 discloses registering users in a social network, wherein registering users includes storing in association with a user ID for each registered user at least one image and verifying the user during a subsequent login by comparing a current image with the stored image.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,966,590 discloses obtaining parental authorization from an additional user having a parental relationship to a user having an age less than a threshold age (a child user) that attempts to access an online service or perform actions using the online service, wherein the online service verifies the validity of the identified user's account, the age of the identified user, and/or a connection between the identified user and the child user having a parental relationship type. The online service may make these verifications based in part on social and transactional information associated with the identified user's account.
However, the techniques known in the art do not provide an effective control of the usage of the software applications, with particular reference to the age of the persons using them.